So, after our watermelon craft we continued the project with learning "fruit words" through creating them from different materials. This time it was a turn of ORANGE, which I mentioned about in my previous post. As Karolina started to pronounce this word in Russian as "A-S-I-S-I-N" or "A-E-S-I-N" instead of correct variant "A-P-E-L-S-I-N" , we must learn it and repeat all the time.

This craft is very easy, doesn't take so much time and usually you cannot make anything with your toddler for long. That's why using only paper, scissors and a pen, your toddler can get a juicy orange which will raise mood up (it is proved that orange colour stimulates enthusiasm and creativity, and its driving characteristic is curiosity).

How you do it:
- cut out 1 big circle from orange coloured paper and a smaller one from white piece of paper.
- cut 6 or 8 triangles from orange piece of paper
- glue white circle over the orange one
- glue orange triangles one by one over white circle.

In this craft activity you can also repeat names of shapes and colours what we actually did with Karolina during our work.

Now our 2 fruit decorate our fridge in the kitchen. Karolina smiles and points at them every time when comes inside and sees them. So at the moment, I must look for more space on our fridge for next crafted fruit =))))

All kids like watermelons, starting from the taste - very sweet, and finishing with the playing with it which goes between the fingers so nice-))))squeezed and juicy-)))) Karolina had so much fun today with this fruit and what is more important she learnt the word watermelon in Russian. Of course it was not 100% correct, skipping some letters but she did it and liked it (instead of "A-R-B-U-Z" she says "A-B-U").

Yesterday my little girl said the word "orange" in russian as well, though it sounds similar to german one (language of her father) - "A-P-E-L-S-I-N" which sounded like "A-E-S-I-N" or sometimes like "A-S-I-S-I-N" by Karolina. After such progress with a word per day, I was very happy that little by little my sweetie starts speaking. To improve it I decided to start a new small project with her - a kind of "Fruity project" where we will try to make some fruits or berries which we eat and learn to speak.

So, today we made a watermelon craft with Karolina which she loved a lot. Of course there are different variants from what you can do it, just the paper and glue for example, but we used a foam paper today, as it is new texture for Karolina and the seeds of watermelon we drew with a black poster paint

What you need:

- green and red foam paper
- scissors, glue, brush
- black paint (we used poster paint as it is better in this case than watercolour)

How you do it:
- Find a template of watermelon in internet, print and cut it out (or draw yourself 2 pieces which reminds a shape of watermelon piece, what we actually did) from green and red foam paper
- Glue the green piece and stick the red piece onto it.

- Draw watermelon seeds with black paint and THAT's IT-))))

During this activity I tried to teach Karolina colours again, as it is difficult for her now to give correct answer on my question "where is blue.... or red", we remembered how sweet it was and tasty when we ate it, we learnt about seeds, that she should be careful during eating, what colour they are, etc and of course we compared our watermelon with the picture of real one from internet, and Karolina pointed at it, repeating "A-B-U, A-B-U", while that one we have in the fridge is "sleeping" and waiting for Karolina to be eaten tomorrow-))))

Today Karolina was busy with cosmetics and different tubes of creams on the shelves where she found cotton balls as well. She was always interested in them, separating or just throwing around herself. Suddenly, I remembered that saw somewhere a craft for kids where you can make a sheep with the help of these very cotton balls and cardboard. So, to spend our time in more fascinating way, we agreed to do such kind of sheep.

The example of sheep image we took from our posters which we have from Kindermusik with Anja as Karolina knows them very well.

What you need to make a cotton ball sheep:
1) cardboard (we have black for all parts of body)
2) scissors
3) glue
4) cotton balls (we took all colours from the package, but to make it more realistic of course you need white ones)
5) 2 googly eyes

How to do a sheep:
1) Cut out
- a big circle which will be body of the sheep covered later with cotton balls;
- a small circle which will be a head of the sheep
- 4 rectangles as legs of the sheep (we cut out 2 legs, don't know why I did it-)))))
- 2 rectangles which you can fold and make ears
2) Each cotton ball put in a glue and stick it to the body of the sheep. Or as alternative you can glue the body and then cover it with balls. Our choice was on purpose that Karolina didn't spread glue everywhere around but just was playing with these balls "which were jumping with the help of her at first to the glue and then to the sheep".

3) Stick the legs at the bottom of the body. We decorated them as well with other balls which were "bells of the sheep shoes"
4) Stick the head to the body
5) Glue googly eyes and ears on the head of the sheep. Don't forget to make a smile for a sheep too-)))

Karolina was comparing then her own sheep with the picture and tried to voice it, though it sounded more like a cow-))) Of course, our sheep doesn't look like real sheep as well, with its 2 legs and ears which look not like ears, but the main idea of it was caught by my darling and this is the most important.